A magnetic stripe card reader for reading a magnetic stripe on a card having at least one track of magnetically stored information stored thereon as a stream of encoded discrete data bits separated by bit times is disclosed. Aa magnetic head is provided for reading the magnetic pulses as the magnetic stripe is passed thereby to output a time varying analog signal. A data converter incorporated on an integrated circuit is then operable for converting the analog signal to a digital time series of digital values. A processor incorporated on the integrated circuit can ten process the digital output of the data converter and is operable to first determine potential bit boundaries and then recover timing information from the digital time series to discriminate the bit times between data bits. The value of each data bit is then determined during each bit time to provide a stream of extracted data bits.